How can you capture some of the magic of animation without blowing a big hole in your budget?

Minivid is a simple animation solution that lets you create custom cartoon shorts and share them with the world. The site provides a demo for using all the features, but the drag-and drop functionality of this application makes it a snap to create and edit animations in minutes. Fuzzwich has preloaded Minivid with a stable of playful “actors”, multi-layer backgrounds, and music selections. Hit record and position your actors on screen by dragging them with your mouse. Add comment bubbles or choose from each actors available actions menu. For example, the ninja can throw a ninja star or use his sword; another character can grow a beard. You can even change the the scale of the actors or the timing of events by pausing your animation and manipulating all the ingredients in the editing bar.

Check out this nifty little animation we created on the fly:

Fuzzwich publishes and hosts all your animations on their site; animators are given a free portfolio space, where you can share your animations, launch mini cartoon campaigns, or embed your animations in your website or social media site (like Facebook or Myspace).

If you are looking to add something fun to your site or need a free tool for creating branded animations, check out Minivid. Though we warn you, be prepared to lose countless hours playing with this application.

The saddest place on the web? The beautifully styled but totally empty forum. It’s the stark reminder that so often, if you build it, they won’t come.

Now you have an option - try kick-starting your site discussion forum with a paid posting service like ForumsFirst. Their stable of professional writers produce blog commentary and discussion threads on-demand and tailor-made to your website or blog. ForumsFirst offers a variety of reasonable content packages. For those who want to dip their toes in water, a trial blog package only costs $5. You get 12 comments, a minimum of 40 words each, from two registered users. Ready to dive in? The Jumbo package will set you back $225 for 750 comments, from 10-12 registered users, over the course of 15 weeks.

ForumsFirst also offers bookmarking services. For $20, they will add your website or blog to del.ic.ious and other top bookmarking sites. Search engines like Google and Yahoo rely on social bookmarking sites for their vast catalog of user-approved urls. In other words, the more links your site has on del.ic.ious, the better your site will rank in organic search.

If your visitors currently hear crickets when they visit your forum, here’s how to get the party started.

As we discussed in Talk amongst yourselves, there are a number of web-based tools to help you create a dialog with your customers or readers. However, some companies (and bloggers) would rather these conversations take place on home turf. And who can blame them?

Thanks to Yedda’s suite of blogger widgets, you can turn your website or blog into an open forum. Like Yahoo Answers, Yedda leverages the wisdom of crowds in a simple Q&A platform. The twist here is that Yedda understands the most important questions and answers come from your own audience.

The Profile Widget streams all your personal Yedda Q&A’s on your site, letting you share your knowledge directly with your readers, while the FAQ Widget posts pre-selected frequently asked questions and answers from the Yedda community. With the Ask A Question Widget, your readers can ask and answer questions on any topic. Yedda publishes the questions on Yedda.com and rewards you with a link back to your site.

So whether you are looking to add dynamic content to your site or looking for a free tool to help increase your site traffic, Yedda can be a good answer.

Bloggers are looking for high caliber advertisers. Advertisers are looking to reach a targeted audience of blog readers.

Enter the broker - Federated Media Publishing. It connects marketers with a network of respected sites that cater to targeted segments of readers. Marketers can place advertising on any of Federated’s member sites or select a site(s) based on its recognition or audience makeup (business people, moms, etc). Sign up, choose your blog, choose the time period, then fork over the moolah. You’re still not out of the woods until you’re confirmed. Blog authors retain veto power over which ads appear on their site.

Federated’s prices depend on ad size and of course, ad location. If you’re looking to reach a targeted audience and you know they read blogs, give it a try. If you’re speaking directly to your target, a high CPM could very well be worth it.

Anyone who sells anything from croissants to chemicals knows the painful truth of so many product-focused businesses. You end up giving away a lot of services for free.

Now, no matter the size of your business, you have an easy tool for selling your knowledge with MindBites. Here’s how it works. Sign up to become an author, create your short video, upload it, promote it, and then, ideally wait for your viewers to show up. Every time someone views your video, you earn $1. Viewers pay between 1.69 and $1.99 to purchase your small video. It’s early going in the sale of video content, so you’re not likely to make a fortune.

If you or your brand already have significant star power, let this serve as an example that you can apply in a site of your own. In any case, no matter what business you’re in, think about how you might be able to monetize all of the services that you currently offer for free.

If there were to be a dig against Digg, it would be that it’s overly focused on all things technology. And, daresay, all things Apple.

Now there’s another player available that goes well beyond tech stories, a site called Mixx. You might have seen it as it’s featured as an option at the end of every story on CNN.com. Needless to say, that feature on such a popular news site is driving all sorts of new traffic. It works much like its competitor. As an example, we’ve added the feed growth! post from yesterday. Please go on and promote it so you can see Mixx in action.

If you have an interesting blog and are looking to reach a more targeted audience, here’s your change. Just sign up, then start adding your interesting articles … to the Mixx.

While it’s great to have access to brilliant designers, you don’t always have that luxury. No matter what size your brand or company, if you’re like most marketers, you’ll always want to make your marketing materials or images just look a little bit better.

Now you can. Just get your hands on an easy to use, online version of Photoshop, aptly named Photoshop Express. You can upload an image, tweak it, resize, change the colors, convert it to a cartoon, and maybe even add your watermark. It’s a skinny web-based version of the nearly overwhelming (both in complexity and price) original desktop application. In other words, you don’t have to be a design rocket scientist to use it.

Once you upload and change your photos, you can store up to 2 Gigabytes of images. All for free.

Blogging is a lot like brushing your teeth - the benefits accrue from both repetition and consistency. We’ve all seen those lonely company or brand blogs out there - with the sad little post every few months.

Now the line from a creative spark to a new blog post just got shorter, with ScribeFire. Say you’ve just come across an interesting article somewhere and you want to add it, along with your comments, to your blog. All you need to do is choose an icon on the bottom of your Firefox browser (sorry IE users, now’s the time to think about Firefox) and up flips a nice text entry tool. Create your blog entry (pick your category, link to prior posts) and post right there on the spot.

No more months between blog posts, please.

Sometimes, all you need is a little space. Not a huge website or complicated design - just a space to post an idea, collaborate with coworkers, or just to get online in front of your customers.

Thanks to Google Sites, you can create a simple website or project space with no knowledge of html or any technical inclination. Even better, its free. All you need is a Google account (this too is free) to get started. After a few basic questions and a single click, your website is up and running. You can customize the look and feel of the page, add text and images, and of course start using it to sell to your customers.

No matter what size your business may be, you can and should have a presence on the web. Here’s a very easy way to make that happen.

Twitter (see Stay close to Mother Hen) is a micro-blogging site that’s easy to use from just about anywhere - by phone or computer. It has been embraced by a segment of the tech savvy population. What you may not know is that it’s also a potential source of information about your brand, depending on your target.

TweetBeep is a simple tool that will let you monitor the conversation among the digerati. Are they talking about you or your competitor? Is there something important happening in your marketplace that you need to know about? All you need to do is sign up, choose your targeted key words, and then you’ll be notified if they’re among the “tweets” of the day.

It’s a simple, free investment that could keep you ahead of the crowd.

You guessed it. There’s a similar solution that’s still in beta called IdeaScale. It was developed to help people use crowd sourcing to identify and rate innovation ideas. You can signup, create your own Ideascale, even add your logo. Then, you just invite potential participants and ask them to join in the fun. Participants can vote on existing ideas (either promoting them or demoting the dogs), or, alternatively, create their own to be judged by everyone else.

If you’re looking for input on just about anything, with something of a free form approach, here’s your chance. The system is free for now, but likely to not be so cheap after it emerges from beta. Jump in and see what you can learn.

You have a new weapon to use in the simple timeline tool Dipity. What’s interesting here is not only that you can populate a timeline with events. It’s that you can populate it with information that’s already out on the web, using everything from RSS feeds to changes to your Flickr account. While it has some entertainment value, the business idea here is to use it to help differentiate your service from your competitor. Even if you’re doing something simple like painting houses, here’s a great way to document stages in the process, using images or videos, and then publish the whole thing on your site as a case example.

Your customers like reading boring text cases even less than you like writing them. Why don’t you string together web content to tell your story - and sell?

Some of the most vibrant customer support sites are really just forums where someone can easily search and find an answer. If you’re wondering why you haven’t made this possible for your customers, stop wondering.

Start doing. With Lefora, you can have a customer forum up and operational in a matter of minutes. You know the drill. Sign up, provide a name for your forum, pick your username and password, then you’re off to the races. You can customize the categories, of course set the parameters of your forum, and even manage everything. LeFora includes lots of great features, like threaded comments, an editor that makes it easy to embed images and videos, and some handy management tools.

Why not let your customers find the answers, instead of paying someone to answer the same question over and over.

Try inviting a small number of customers to review your marketing tactics using Stixy. It’s a free, web-based bulletin board that that makes sharing photos and notes a snap. Stixy houses a number of widgets in a single, browser-based desktop and is extremely easy to use. Click on “new stixyboard” to get started, then choose the widget (notes, photos, documents, or todo’s) you want to use in the project space. There are no layout restrictions, you can drag and drop just about anything. You can simply upload an image of one of your products, whether it’s a sandwich or a motorcycle. Then, just invite a few customers to review.

The classic problem in marketing research is figuring out what questions to ask. This vehicle lets you give your customers an unstructured way to think about or react to an existing or new product. Don’t worry, your customers won’t bite.

PicApp is an online photo service that lets bloggers and website publishers utilize high-quality stock images for free. To get started, create a PicApp user account and type a simple description of the photo you are looking for in the search bar (e.g. chocolate ice cream). Choose a photo (or two or three) from their library and specify what size you would like to use. You can either save the image to your PicApp Lightbox (a place to store and organize your photos) or prompt the system to generate an embed code.

Unlike traditional stock photo services, you aren’t downloading the actual image. PicApp images are snippets of html code that you insert directly into your website or blog and appear in a flash-based frame (like YouTube).

PicApp generates revenue by placing targeted advertising via sponsored links next to the images- a small price to pay for not having to pay a price at all.

Even if you have moved a lot of your company’s interesting information online (or maybe all of it lives there), your customers might not always want to be online to access it.

Now you can reverse gears and publish from a website to a book using SharedBook. As you might imagine, this isn’t a capability that you can just flip a switch on and have it work. The best way to see how it works is to visit a site who puts their system to work, like Allrecipes.com. On this top rated recipe site, you can print your own cookbook, using just about any content available. Select your recipes, order your recipes, add your intro and images wherever you would like, then purchase a printed version (professionally printed hard or soft cover).

You can even then share the online version of your book and let other people add to or change it for their own use. Other companies who have figured out that people might want to create a customized book include Random House (customized children’s book), Seven Seas Cruises (cruise souvenir), and many others. Would an offline version of online content be something your customers might buy?

It’s easy to forget that most websites are, well, terrible. Bad fonts, ugly images, limited functionality, poor structure.

Yours doesn’t have to be, if you take advantage of Webnode. With this free tool, and with only a web browser, you can create a good looking, basic website. And you don’t have to be a web geek to do it. They provide a tool bar, and then you can drag and drop the elements that you want onto your site - including things like polls, forums, articles, catalogs, and widgets. Even cool and useful stuff like Google maps or Paypal payment buttons.

This tool contains more than 40 templates that you can put to use. There’s no reason to put up with an unattractive website anymore, no matter what your talent or budget level.

When it comes to monetizing an audience, one of the oldest games in town, and one of the most established, is recruiting advertising. Remember when Yahoo! bought HotJobs …

Now you have an easy way to do more or less the same thing, by using Personforce. This outsourced job board company can help turn your site visitors into job searchers (and consequently turn visits into revenue for you). Personforce creates and markets your job board to companies and recruiters, who are willing to pay a premium to list on your website. In return, they take a 20% cut on revenue from job postings posted directly on your site and 50% for job postings they broker for you.

It seems that they’re doing some right, as they have an impressive roster of clients, including Harvard and Stanford, with each seeing 10,000+ student and alumni visitors daily. Here’s an easy way to turn site visitors into dollars … with almost no work on your part. What are you waiting for?